I am grateful to have been able to pursue the life that I wanted.” “As I hit my forties and started working on Women Without Kids, I realised that I had no regrets about not having children,” she says. No one side is ideal, but I think for real positive progress to happen it’s key that both are seen as equally valid. “We’re all just human beings trying to make the best decisions under often very challenging circumstances. “While it felt important to me to speak to women who have said no to motherhood, I don’t want my work to be seen as an ‘us versus them’ piece of literature,” she said. Women Without Kids is ultimately a joyous hymn to self-acceptance, kids or no kids. From debunking the pronatalist ideology behind the notion that parents are ‘better’ to the ‘Motherhood Spectrum’ – the idea that any individual’s desire for parenthood is influenced by socio-economic and cultural factors rather than being innate – and the sexual evolution women without children are embodying by “revoking the biological imperative to procreate”. Warrington unpacks non-motherhood in its many layers and nuances. “Women have more agency over their lives,” she says. And, just as importantly, personal freedom. “For a lot of us, that’s a conscious choice.” As Warrington points out in her extensive research, there are a number of factors behind that choice being unpartnered or unable to afford fertility treatments, but also growing environmental concerns, financial instability, the cost of childcare. “Simply put, things are shifting,” Warrington says. Globally, too, fertility rates have been dropping steadily since the 1970s. Birth rates in Europe dipped to an historic low in 2020, with 4.07 million babies born that year compared to 4.17 million in 2019 – a downward trend that began in 2008. Indeed, over 40% of all women aged 15-49 in the US are childless, according to a study published by the CDC’s National Center For Health Statistics. The truth is, more and more women all around the world are opting out of motherhood, yet there haven’t really been conversations around it. But the numbers couldn’t tell a more different story. “The only real path to a fulfilling life. “For so long, the common belief was that having children was a woman’s main and ‘natural’ purpose,” she says. Weaving her personal story with socio-economic investigations and historical perspectives, Women Without Kids paints a wider picture of women who eschew motherhood – an entire movement and sisterhood, as Warrington tells me. Her latest book Women Without Kids is an attempt by the British-born, US-based writer to offer an answer, and “to make peace with all of this,” as she writes.Īnd not just for herself.
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